This is a bit niche and a departure from my usual content. In this discussion with John Ferreira, I discuss my approach to research and some of the problems involved. If that sounds interesting to you then please watch the video.
John Ferreira has an intriguing decentralised project under development. John’s SifterNews mission is to help investigative journalists and researchers more broadly with their daily workflow and hopefully give them new access to income streams from their raw research.
Sifter is an open-source intelligence tool (OSINT) that empowers any investigator to collect, analyse, and report their findings visually.
John recognises that investigative research is hard and time-consuming, which makes it costly. The Sifter project aims to radically reduce the time needed for investigations by uncovering hidden patterns sooner whilst also providing a new crowdsourced income stream for investigative researchers.
The SifterNews project is intended to provide investigative researchers with a simple way to collect and search through sources and to provide what John calls an amazing user experience for analysing their findings.
John’s objective is to build a SAAS [Software As A Service] product that combines private and publicly sourced data sets with user-generated notes—complemented with a browser extension—to directly reference inline statements. All data points will be visually collated in a user-friendly node-based graph, from which reports can be crafted and subscribed to by internal or external audiences.
The envisaged typical users are investigators, initially investigative journalists, then broadening out to researchers and business analysts. The business model is based upon user subscriptions. But, as I understand it, the plan is to monetise investigative research, enabling independent researchers to share their research with others, either on a fee-paid basis or freely.
Again, as I understand it, John hopes to enable groups of investigative researchers to form their own collectives whose research can be shared among themselves but who can then provide the product of their investigative research to others willing to pay for access.
John kindly wrote a handy summary of our discussion:
Iain Davis, a blogger and researcher, discusses his journey into research and journalism investigation, as well as his approach to critical thinking. He emphasizes the importance of questioning information from all sources and using the Trivium method to analyze and understand events. Davis also shares his process of collecting and organizing information, including unlocking paywalled studies and searching for primary sources. He highlights the challenges of accessing and analysing government reports and documents.
Overall, his work focuses on uncovering the truth and promoting independent thinking. The conversation explores the importance of maintaining access to information and the censorship agenda that aims to control our access to information. It discusses the need for collaboration and collective research to counter censorship and archive valuable information.
The conversation also delves into the concept of critical thinking and the ability to analyse information from different perspectives. It emphasizes the common ground between people with different political ideologies and the importance of working together to uncover the truth.
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